In many communications systems today, including many mobile communications systems, users of such systems typically use a variety of applications operated in conjunction with various service providers, network operators, devices and the like. And as will be appreciated, with the variety of applications, a user can have multiple identities. In this regard, a user can be identified for different applications based upon, for example, an Internet or wide area network (WAN) e-mail address, a corporate or local area network (LAN) e-mail address, a mobile e-mail address, a landline telephone number, a mobile telephone number, and/or one or more pseudonyms or other identifiers.
Typically, a user of communications systems must manually manage and keep track of the user's various identities and with what applications to use each identity. In this regard, a user may use one or more “trusted” applications that are typically configured to use an identity of the user in a manner that maintains the user's privacy. Many trusted applications can require a user to designate a “current preferred identity” for use by the application. For example, an e-mail application may require a user to specify a user identity (e.g., Internet e-mail address, corporate e-mail address, mobile e-mail address, etc.) to use when forwarding e-mail messages. Undesirably, however, conventional applications typically require the user to manually set up, or specify, the preferred identity of the user. Then, each time the user desires for the application to use a different user identity, the user typically must manually change the current preferred identity. To further complicate the user changing the current preferred identity, if multiple applications use the current preferred identity, the user typically must manually change the current preferred identity for each such application.
In addition to one or more trusted applications, a user may use one or more “non-trusted” applications that are not typically configured to maintain the user's privacy. For such non-trusted applications, the user may desire to be identified by one or more different pseudonyms such that the user can otherwise maintain the user's privacy. Conventionally, the user may maintain multiple pseudonyms for different non-trusted applications. However, the user undesirably may be required to manually maintain all of the pseudonyms, and keep track of the non-trusted applications that use respective pseudonyms. And as will be appreciated, such tasks can become quite cumbersome in instances in which the user maintains a large number of pseudonyms for a large number of non-trusted applications.